Appeal No. 2006-1817 Page 15
Application No. 09/851,514
sections of Gerace cited by the examiner teach “a program that uses an equation to
rank advertisements,” and “Gerace never determines guidelines for resolving a
trade-off between the business objectives.” (Appellants’ Brief, pp. 14-15.) With
respect to the examiner’s reliance on the teachings of Harhen, the appellants argue
that the teachings relied upon are not applicable for determining how to allocate
promotions to prospective purchasers/customers in a marketing campaign.
(Appellants’ Reply Brief, p. 4.)
We sustain the examiner’s rejection. Harhen discloses automatically
identifying an inconsistency in achieving two business management objectives,
automatically determining a guideline for resolving a trade-off between the
objectives, and using the guideline in configuring the campaign plan. Specifically,
we agree with the examiner, as explained on pages 25-26 of the Answer, that
Harhen teaches that a user can create a model of an enterprise by “declar[ing] and
instantiat[ing] new objects . . . [and] assign[ing] attributes and values to those
objects.. . .” (Harhen, col. 4, lines 63-66.) The method of Harhen provides for “a
categorization hierarchy of objects.” (Harhen, col. 5, lines 4-5.) This hierarchy
allows Harhen to determine a guideline for resolving a trade-off between the
objects when using the business enterprise model to determine its final hypothesis
and projection values for strategic decision making. (Harhen, col. 6, lines 44-56.)
Based on the teaching of Harhen to provide a categorization hierarchy of
objects for use in the problem tree to automatically decide in what manner to use
the information available in the knowledge base, we find that a person of ordinary
skill in the art at the time of the invention, possessed with the understandings and
knowledge reflected in the prior art, and motivated by the general problem facing
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